We offer our warmest congratulations to our Fellow and Senior Law Tutor, Julie Dickson, who has won the Alice Tay Book Prize for excellence in legal theory.
This prize is awarded by the International Association for the Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy (IVR). The IVR is currently holding its World Congress in Seoul, South Korea.
Elucidating Law (OUP 2022) addresses how legal philosophers should approach and engage with their subject-matter, and what constraints are incumbent on them as they do so? Julie offers her own distinctive response, advocating that legal philosophers should espouse an approach that Dickson terms ‘Indirectly Evaluative Legal Philosophy.’ This distinctive approach can facilitate legal philosophers’ understanding of aspects of the nature of law, whilst avoiding prematurely or inappropriately regarding law as inherently morally valuable. Law is a powerful, systemic, and institutionalized social tool. It should be understood in a manner appropriate to its character.
Julie says, “It’s a particular honour that the prize is named after the eminent Australian legal philosopher Alice Erh-Soon Tay who contributed so much to both jurisprudence and to the advancement of human rights. My future research plans include examining further the idea of ‘experience-sensitive engagement with features of law’ that I introduced in chapter 4 of Elucidating Law. In my view, this idea has the potential to bring together aspects of the analytical, and the critical, traditions in the philosophy of law.”
A version of this article was originally published on the Law Faculty website and is republished here with our thanks.